Ulysses on "Degree" - Shakespeare's doctrine of political order?

Ulysses on "Degree" - Shakespeare's doctrine of political order? Take but degree away—untune that string, And hark what discord follows— Ulysses' famous speech on "degree" in Troilus and Cressida, I. iii., still has an almost talismanic quality in the criticism of Shakespeare, and elsewhere. The speech is referred to repeatedly as the locus classicus of "the general acceptance in the sixteenth century of the classical concept of a fixed social order." It was cited as the most eloquent encapsulation of his theme by E.M.W. Tillyard in the book which established for a generation of students the Elizabethan World Picture as the intellectual and spiritual map of the sixteenth-century mind, which of course meant Shakespeare's mind too. In spite of the qualms which almost all critics of Troilus and Cressida now express about the "ironies" or sardonic reservations that the play has about Ulysses as a spokesman, his speech exerts a powerful influence on ideas of Shakespeare's politics. No-one would be quite as plainspoken today as H.B. Charlton was when he told the English Association in 1929 that Shakespeare's politics were identical with those of Coriolanus, to whom "the rankscentedness of the many is no less a political disablement than is their mutability", and who "saw nothing but anarchy in democracy". But perhaps it is not only Lord Simon of Glaisdale who believes that "conservatism can claim Shakespeare as one of its spiritual ancestors. W e find it difficult not to identify Ulysses' impassioned speech on order with the dramatist's own convictions." Such is the prestige of the Order myth that even those who do not want a conservative Shakespeare are bedevilled by it. Arnold Kettle, for example, argues that Shakespeare need not be thought of as "bourgeois" nor "representative of the decaying Feudal Ruling Class." To turn Shakespeare into an amiable reactionary he says "is to drain the very life blood from his plays." But in the same essay he concedes that "Shakespeare often emphasises the virtues of stability, order and degree." What is most significant for criticism is that this idea of Shakespeare's orthodoxy exerts a powerful influence on thinking about the History plays. Irving Ribner, for instance, asserted that "the most common political doctrine proclaimed in the history plays ... (is) that of the absolute authority of the king" and cited as most influential on Shakespeare those classic expressions of Tudor dogma which are regularly referred to as the sources for the Degree speech. More recently Helen Gardner wrote that "we can all accept, because it is so wholly dead, the notion of Order and Hierarchy as a universal Law of Nature and the basis of a proper social order, and find that this given us a 192 T.M. Burvill perspective from which to interpret the History plays." In this essay I do not propose to examine the Elizabethan World Picture as a whole, nor all of the Great Chain of Being. I want to take up the question of whether the Degree speech really can be counted as proof of Shakespeare's political conservatism, or, to put it another way, of his subscription to the ideology of the apologists for Tudor absolutism. I do not think that acceptance of the political aspect of the Elizabethan World Picture—that is, of the coercive authority for Shakespeare of notions of the king's divine right, responsibility only to God, and of the absolute duty of subjects to obey under all conditions, is the best perspective from which to interpret the History plays. Also I think there may be a more dialectical relationship between sources such as Elyot's Governor, the 1547 and 1571 Homilies on Obedience and Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polityand the speech Ulysses makes than is usually implied. Writers on this subject do not seem to pay sufficient attention to possibilities such as those suggested by the second part of the sentence I quoted from Zeeveld's Foundations of Tudor Policy Intellectual historians have quite properly emphasised the general acceptance in the sixteenth century of the classical concept of a fixed social order as a basis for Tudor authoritarianism; but it is equally true that...